Front matter that agrees with itself

Assembling a packet — several documents, a cover, a contents page, bookmarks, consistent numbering — looks like four independent jobs. It is not. Each one shifts the pages the others refer to, and doing them in the wrong sequence produces a document where nothing quite lines up.

The problem in one sentence

Anything you add at the front changes the page number of everything behind it.

Add a contents page listing "Pricing …… 4", then add a cover, and Pricing is now on page 5 while the contents still says 4. The document looks finished and is subtly wrong, in the way that is only discovered by the person you sent it to.

Three specific traps

Contents pages count themselves. A contents page listing entries at pages 1, 4 and 8 pushes all of them down by one the moment it is inserted. Every number on it needs to already account for its own existence — and if the contents runs to two pages, by two. This is easy arithmetic and easy to forget, and the result is a contents page that is uniformly one out.

Bookmarks do not survive a rebuild. Adding pages at the front means constructing a new document and copying the old pages into it. The outline — the sidebar list of bookmarks — lives in the document catalogue, and it is not copied. Bookmarks written before the cover was added are silently gone. Not broken, not pointing at the wrong page: absent, with no error.

Numbering starts where you tell it, not where the content does. A cover and a contents page should not be numbered, and the first real page should usually read "1", not "3". Those are two separate settings — how many pages to skip, and what number to start at — and conflating them is what produces reports whose first page of substance is labelled page 3.

A sequence that works

1. Combine the documents. Note where each section starts *before* you merge, because afterwards the boundaries are invisible: a merged PDF has no idea where one document ended. 2. Cover page. 3. Contents, inserted after the cover rather than in front of it, with entries adjusted for both. 4. Bookmarks, last, so the rebuild that front matter causes cannot discard them. 5. Page numbers, skipping the front matter.

The ordering is not arbitrary and not obvious. Bookmarks feel like they belong with the structural work at the start; they have to go at the end.

The check that catches everything

Open the finished document and pick one entry in the middle of the contents. Click it. Confirm three things agree: the page it lands on, the number printed on that page, and the bookmark for that section.

If all three match for one section in the middle, they almost certainly match everywhere. If any two disagree, the sequence went wrong, and it is much faster to rebuild than to patch.